


At The Heart

by Smaragdina



Category: Dishonored
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-03
Updated: 2013-01-04
Packaged: 2017-11-23 14:22:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 2,649
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/623130
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Smaragdina/pseuds/Smaragdina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"They will always be, or at least there will always be those such as them, long after the rats take back what is theirs." Brief character studies of the entire cast.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Wicked

They dream so high and do not care to look down at the foundations laid beneath their feet.

_Thaddeus Campbell_

He hates the stark rigidity of the Abbey in which he spends his days. The stones of the Abbey are white so that stains will show all the clearer. His coat is the red of all this corruption, wine and desire and blood. His hands are brutish. There is no subtlety or give about him. He is more fitting to the faith than he will ever admit or understand.

_Custis Pendleton_

His mind is tuned to facts and figures and not to the realities of slave ships and the shuddering dark of the mines. He takes. His fingertips are stained with the ink of the ledger. It is as dark as a bruise. It is far darker than blood.

_Morgan Pendleton_

There is nothing that is not his right. The girls look away from his gaze. He likes to leave marks upon their skin like a signature, wholly his, possession, something that is not twined up in the shadow and expectation of his twin, a thing that is his alone.

_Hiram Burrows_

Everything is polished. His coat is tailored tight. His rings gleam. The rumors that he works in must be tried and tested and proven true before he brings them to light and fits them to his plans. He is all gilt and clean lines and cleverness, and when put to the rack he snaps like clear glass. He will count each piece as it falls. All must be in its proper place. All must be his. He knows no other way.


	2. The Chimeric

No matter how many guises they wear, they do not and will not escape the bite of the two beside them.

_Esma Boyle_

She believes that her world is circumscribed by the mouth of a glass, that all her brilliance lies in kisses and brittle laughter. Her eyes are down. The stars she dreams of glitter in rings of diamond on her hands and not, anymore, in a distant sky. Her daughter is the best of her, all the desires she cannot hope to reach poured into one small ear late at night, small face turned upward to the limitless dark.

_Lydia Boyle_

She is so much larger than this, just as her music unfurls to fill the space of each room that contains it, to lick at the rafters and seek out ways beyond. She ceased following the written notes on the page long ago. The highest and the lowest keys of the harpsichord are soft with dust, untouched by her fingers, because she does not press against the limits that are set and known but rather the ones that live in the middle, the abstract, the freedom of being unseen.

_Waverly Boyle_

She likes to think that she changes her face, but each disguise is colder, snakeskin giving way to further snakeskin. The lace at her throat is scales. She stands in shadows and warms her hands at the warmth of her sisters’ blaze, and when the light slants across her own skin she doe not see it. She is made hollow for them, and brilliant for them, and she can peel away and peel away but there is nothing deeper because the wound is scarred over and not anything like a wound at all.


	3. The Masked

It is easier to smile through a face that is false.

_Adelle White_

The game they all play is futile and this is why she drinks wine and loves to see it crashing down. She is a fly buzzing around the rich rot of nobility. She will be swatted. She has done things. She is old, she does not care. This is the game.

_Jack Ramsey_

He is a careful man. He picks rank and rumor apart with the delicacy of knives in the flesh of a whale, and he puts them back together again. The sea in which the leviathans live is boundless, and so is the depth to which he may sink, and he will survive.

_Montgomery Shaw_

He is caged and collared and snaps at all who venture close. It would be easy to turn on the count of two and fire his pistol into the heart. He does not. This is not what he has been broken for.

_Timothy Brisby_

He loves her like water. He is fingers of rain sliding against clear windowpanes. He is the flood in the basement. Upward rising. He is the lick of a river against a soft shore, that slow erosion. He curls around the sink of her body and accepts it. He will always love her and he will always be there, and if there is scum at the bottom of the river it does not matter because he is there, he is hers, she is his, he is there.


	4. The Disloyal

When they cut their hands to form their alliance, each one already dreamed of breaking it.

_Farley Havelock_

He is wood, and ship, and metal, and stone, and things that are hard and true. The sea breaks and crashes against him but he will never wear away. He seeks to tame it, but it is the unstoppable force and he the immovable object. There is no depth to him that can be plumbed or set aright, just solid walls, and bitterness like salt, and things that must be done.

_Treavor Pendleton_

His favorite suit is the color of mildew, of pale rot, and this is the only truth about him. If men push at him he gives. If men push at him he breaks. The words he weaves around himself are like bandages, white wrapping, and the bruises go deep, and he wears prickly self-possession as obvious and stiff as a plaster cast, and he does not understand when they ask him if it hurts.

_Teague Martin_

His faith is as sharp as the edge of a knife. He knows how to wield both, expertly; it is a surgical thing, words of Stricture slicing in between rib to pierce through the heart. He knows the story of every scar. There are things the he wants and he cannot have; there are things that he can do and he cannot dare; there are lies he tells himself in the dark, and the knife in his hand is very sharp, and he dreads the cut and the unravel.


	5. The Forgotten

They are dust, they are cobweb, they are mildew; they are ghost, they haunt.

_Lydia_

The apron is freshly starched and the glasses are clean and stacked in neat and precise rows. Her head is high. If she dreams of something else, she remembers to sweep the dust from every corner and polish the floor until it gleams, because it is a job that can never be done, because this is all that she must always be.

_Cecelia_

No matter which way she turns with regard to the light, it seems that her shadow always falls before her steps and announces her as if it is more real than she. Her body is narrow. He clothes hang loose and are not proper. She is like the tea she makes, the ghost and flavor of leaf and not the substance. She breathes on grimed glass to watch her breath take shape. It vanishes. She cleans the glass, and so does she.

_Wallace Higgins_

Silver polishes from black, bronze from deeper black, iron from sick red, copper from rotten green. He has spent so long keeping the stains from everything that he does not see them. He keeps himself set in the steel-rigid framework of those he serves. It has become his bones. He has spent his life defending a polished brilliance that no one can ever possess.


	6. The Constant

They will always be, or at least there will always be those such as them, long after the rats take back what is theirs.

_Geoff Curnow_

The sword in his hand is good steel and the watchman’s pistol shoots straight, and this is all he needs to know. He is a simple man. If his patrol walks him past a swarm of rats he will kill it, and if they leap up and tear the flesh from his bones it was only his duty to die.

_Callista Curnow_

The face she sees in the mirror is not hers. Her desire is sea who’s border cannot be found, the wind that passes through sails and cannot be possessed. People say she is a good and dutiful woman and it is the cruelest compliment she knows. The books that she keeps are not suitable, tales for boys, tales for children, and when children beg for stories she bows her head and does not have the heart to deny.

_Samuel Beechworth_

He is the river that goes on and on and on. He is old, and the things he knows are deep, and if someone asks he will tell. It is better not to ask. He is as worn as the surface of a gale-wrinkled sea. The greatest of his scars is the name on his boat. He spins stories, and the words fall as easy as rain, and if they ask if he is lonely he will only say that all of the stories are with him, and the things he loves are simple, and it is so much simpler not to ask at all.

_The Propaganda Officer_

The words he speaks are not his own. They taste of the lightning that hits before the thunder. He is the breath held somewhere in between. Just a voice. Faceless. He only does what they tell him.


	7. The Shrewd

Their hands are ragged, and the things that they sell are not lovely.

_Griff_

There will always be those such as him. His fingers play over metal, coin, things pulled from pockets of drowned men in the river, scrounged and sold away. He does not fear the plague and does not fear the desperation it brings. He stands still, and they come to him, and money changes hands, and in this way he is sick and never sick at all.

_Arthur Bunting_

He deals in things that can never be sold. Art. Desire. His touch is gilded. He believes himself to be honest. All who look at him can see the false backing, the price hiked high as a skirt, the buckle of the canvas and the warp of the frame.

_Madame Prudence_

All of her is paint and dye. Her nails are lacquered and claw-sharp. The stink of rot is around her, too-sweet fruit and meat and tang of sex and heady fume of lies upon the smoke-blue air, and her lace is rich and tattered and rustles when she walks, and this is the only soft thing about her.

_Slackjaw_

All of his wealth is liquid, whether it lies in stolen goods or stolen men or rich whiskey or rich blood. He does not need the rumors of a king in his past. Rumors cannot be turned for profit. He is a king unto himself.


	8. The Branded

They have been driven to doorways and gutters and alleys by his gaze – to places that are shadowed, howling, half-outside but not quite.

_The Torturer_

He carves the words he speaks into flesh. The whip is a tongue that licks and unveils, and the bone it uncovers is lovely and white as rune. It sings to him. He sings back in the only speech he possesses – the knife, the heavy hand, the red-hot iron.

_Granny Rags_

She has filled natural philosophy books and nightmares both with all the things she knows. She is blind because she sees too much. She haunts the dark cave, the ruin, the things best forgotten. She dreams of birds, and flight, and feathers brilliant, and the swirl and gilt of high society, and the swirl of water around both their feet as she danced under a crescent moon as sharp and precious as a boning knife.

_Daud_

The air around him tastes of smoke. Arson-fire screaming through a city under siege by plague and murder. Corpses set ablaze. Burning bridges. His coat is the color of lit coals and all his dreams are in red, and sometimes this red is not blood, and sometimes the blood is hers, and sometimes it is his. This is not what he wants. It is what he deserves.


	9. The Brilliant

They describe and bind and set down all the secrets of stars that are so much larger than themselves.

_Piero Joplin_

He is fever. His hands tremble in the mornings because he has too much to do. He is stained and dusted over with the dust of copper, oil, arrogance, blindness, impossible ideas. He dreams of a door to the howling Void but he has already reached it, he has long since stepped over the brink, his brilliance is true brilliance because he pulls it from that blue and empty air.

_Anton Sokolov_

He studies black holes until he becomes one, until everything is given to him and nothing is returned. He twists the shapes of all that falls into his clever hands: women, whales, lightning from the sky. He turns them into art. He turns them into war. They throw themselves against with grasping hands and call for more. There is nothing in life that is barred from him but the one thing he desires.


	10. The Royal

The walls of the Tower are clean and lovely and unyielding, and this is what it requires them to be: the white pawn, the black king.

_Jessamine Kaldwin_

She is hemmed in like a leviathan by sleek and deadly ships. This makes her no lesser; this makes her sing only the louder. Her gaze turns away from herself, and so does her fear. Her death should have been foretold since childhood: her skin is pale as bone, and her eyes are as dark as the eyes of the one who will take her as his own, and when she smiles it is clear that her love and her heart shine through all the cracks in her and will never die at all.

_Emily Kaldwin_

It is not that she desires to rule, only that she desires to rule over others. She will take back everything they took from her. Her laughter is piercing as the cries of gulls and her white is innocent or stark or blinding. The stories she loves best are all those of battle, of high seas with no horizon, of spilling blood, of adventure that can never be brought down to reality. She will reach for them just the same. She will make all the world hers. They will have no choice but to adore her.


	11. The Hollow

To call them men would be a kindness.

_The Outsider_

He is all the words that could ever be. He is none of them. He is a thing apart. He walks in the paradox of words like boundless, eternal, indescribable. Fathomless: possessing depth that no sun can reach. Teeth and sweet rot and waves that curl under toward where they begin. The words cannot encompass him. When they call him strange or fickle or cruel, he smiles. When they call him lonely, he does not understand.

_Corvo Attano_

He has been emptied out by prison and grief and can never be refilled. His is a fall through the Void, the echoing space of a missing heart between ribs. All his violence is held in the hands of others and all his desires are tuned towards theirs. It is not that he bends to their will, it is that he is possessed by it as surely as he may possess their skins. He is only the things they need him to be. He is a knife to be wielded. He is a mask with no face beneath. He is the tide. He loves. He longs. He does not have. He never will.


End file.
